On Aug 26, 2007, at 3:10 AM, Fabio Filasieno wrote:

Smalltalk is very different - you always can add behaviour you

need to the other object and the application logic is distributed

across the system.

That's not the point, but you are right, Unix and Smalltalk are different.

In regard to the black boxes thing.

I think a lot of the differences are superficial, but one seems very deep:  Unix's unifying principle is extensional, Smalltalk intensional.

That is, Unix gets its power from the fact that everything is just represented as bytes, and you can pipe those around.  Who cares what they mean?  To the refined tastes of us Smalltalkers that seems barbaric, but it is very powerful in a very pragmatic sort of way, and gets you extremely loose coupling and late binding (of things other than the fact that it's all just bytes).  Of course, you lose moving to higher levels of abstraction, and no, XML doesn't really do it.

Smalltalk, on the other hand, does really well with modelling semantics, as objects sending messages, but has a hard time extending its unifying principle outside the image.  Which is somewhat ironic considering the idea was connecting things and late, late binding.

Marcel